To accelerate development, Saronic's software team used a cheap plastic raft and off-the-shelf electronics to build and test their autonomy stack in parallel while the hardware team developed the first purpose-built vessel. This scrappy approach de-risked and sped up their path to a finished product.

Instead of focusing on large platforms like destroyers, Saronic analyzes naval firepower through a startup lens: unit economics. By comparing the cost per Vertical Launch System (VLS) missile tube, they show how autonomous ships can deliver more firepower, faster, for less money.

Autonomy enables a first-principles redesign of vessels. By eliminating the need for human crews, ships can be built with fundamentally less steel and fewer labor hours, drastically reducing costs and build times compared to traditional naval platforms.

To solve the skilled labor shortage in shipbuilding, companies like Saronic apply a tech industry playbook. They offer high wages, comprehensive benefits, and company equity to welders and pipe fitters, making advanced manufacturing an attractive career path for a new generation.

Instead of seeking a scarce, experienced workforce, Saronic designs ships for manufacturability. This counterintuitive approach allows them to train thousands of new workers, fundamentally solving the industry's talent bottleneck rather than just working around it and enabling a revitalization of the industrial base.

By vertically integrating, Saronic can optimize a ship's design for ease of manufacturing and simultaneously design the factory layout for that specific ship. This hardware-software co-design approach, common in chipmaking, is now being applied to heavy industry for massive efficiency gains.

A new investment thesis, "American Dynamism," focuses on startups rebuilding America's industrial base in areas like defense, energy, and manufacturing. These companies are motivated by a patriotic mission, attracting talent and capital to solve hard physical problems traditionally ignored by venture capital.

The push to build defense systems in America reveals that critical sub-components, like rocket motors or high-powered amplifiers, are no longer manufactured domestically at scale. This forces new defense companies to vertically integrate and build their own factories, essentially rebuilding parts of the industrial base themselves.

Kleiner Perkins, a traditional venture capital firm, is leading a $1.5 billion round for defense startup Saronic. This signals a broader VC trend of moving beyond crowded software markets to invest in capital-intensive hardware businesses. Firms are betting that companies like Saronic can build monopoly-like, defensible positions similar to SpaceX.